Simon Rowberry

The following is my contribution to the Nabokov Doctoral Day event. While I hope to return to the questions posed by this paper in future research, I’m posting the talk here as a record of my argument.

[Before embarking on my topic, it is worth briefly reflecting on the processes I took to arrive at it. My initial PhD prospectus was ambitious, outlining a working methodology for exploring the digital annotation of post-War novels including Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. As I am currently in limbo between submission and examination of a completely different PhD, I am aware of how ambitious this plan was. Nonetheless, my interests have remained with digital humanities, but over the development of my PhD, another field garnered my interest: book history. These two nebulous pseudo-disciplines gel and offer fertile methodological grounds that are still in development. This shift in focus pushed Nabokov outside my primary focus in order to develop new models of (hyper)textuality. Fortunately, there was still room to explore the book history of Pale Fire. If I were to start again now, with the ability to write purely on Nabokov and the necessary resources, the following sketches out my ideal thesis. It also expands upon methodological strengths and weaknesses of the approach for future work.]

Nabokov studies have thus far been largely immaterial, ignoring the problems of publication and reception that create the socio-economic conditions of Nabokov’s works. The field of book history offers a critical vocabulary to enrich Nabokov studies. Book history emerged as a nebulous interdisciplinary activity in the twentieth century in response to the much more conservative field of bibliography. The “New Bibliography” of the early twentieth century resulted in an empirical fussiness towards the idealized state of a great text that overwhelmed the potential to historicize the development of these texts. In particular, the concept that the author was the sole important contribution to the composition of the text jarred against the appearance of many colourful characters who dot the history of the book (e.g. Wynkyn de Worde, Thomas Jefferson, and the Little Giddings community). Book history, on the other hand, revels in the supporting cast—almost to a fault—and exposes the material, socio-economic and intellectual conditions in which texts are produced. In recent decades, work such as Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, William Sherman’s Used Books and James Secord’s Victorian Sensation have offered vital evidence of the real reader within the empirical study of the book. These scholar projects refer to pre-1923, or what Matt Kirschenbaum termed “B©,” texts as true book historical research requires access that copyright, archival permissions and belligerent literary estates often prohibit. That is not say that we cannot make a good start towards this with an author who primarily published after year-zero of current copyright protection.

It would be churlish to suggest that good work in this area has not already been undertaken—Maxim Shrayer and Lyndsay Miller’s work on Nabokov’s revision processes, Brian Boyd’s Library of America editions of the American works and Michael Juliar’s extensive enumerative bibliography rank among the most important—but within the field, it is undeniable that critical arguments are rarely built upon the material conditions of his literary output. The idiosyncrasy of referencing conventions and standard editions in the scholarship is one of the most apparent and immediate manifestations of this blindspot. This, however, may all change in the next few years due to an unorthodox catalyst: The Original of Laura. When Dmitri Nabokov decided to publish TOoL in its unfinished form, complete with perforated index cards, this revealed the processes behind his other polished texts. The aesthetic quality of the artifact (for it is hard to call it a novel) is secondary to its importance as a book historical object as we are confronted with the stark reality of not only Nabokov’s revision process, but editorial decisions that make up the final text.This suggested a move in the literary legacy from tightly controlled access to more open and amenable conditions towards reassessing our understanding Nabokov as an actual author in the complexities of the book trade. Early criticism of TOoL has taken the prompt to assess the book historical value of the novel. This critical move is only possible because of TOoL’s unique form, unlike previous posthumous publications, most notably his Lectures on Literature, edited by the domineering Fredson Bowers, a stout disciple of the New Bibliography. While TOoL has been a major catalyst in pushing critical attention in this direction, Nabokov literary output also encourages it. From Lolita onwards, Nabokov’s fiction frequently parodied, questioned and otherwise cajoled all aspects of the book trade. Take the unfinished quality of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada, which all feature moments where it is clear that the work has not received the careful editing it may have otherwise received it was complete. Take for example, Humbert Humbert’s note for the printer of Lolita: “Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer,” which is left ignored; and Ada’s fictional editors Ada and Van Veen have also presented their final text with marginal comments to each other intact, such as “Hue or who? Awkward. Reword! (marginal note in Ada Veen’s late hand)” embedded directly into the textual world. In Pale Fire, this can be seen in the juxtaposition between “Insert before a professional” and “A professional proofreader has carefully rechecked the printed text of the poem.” The unfinished quality of these works prompts readers to delve further into their composition and reception.

If we choose to approach Nabokov studies with a book historical tint, a whole range of new questions become apparent. The methodologies central to book historical practice offer a variety of new approaches to Nabokov including, but not limited to, looking at composition processes, the role of editors, his sales figures, and the way in which he was received by a popular audience. Today, I will primarily take a holistic view by approaching at the macro-scale of modelling the book trade. The most famous model of the book trade is Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, which posits three significant prompts for the study of book history: (1) the continuous link between reception and (re)publication; (2) the importance of the socio-economic factors around the text; and (3) the role of pirates, smugglers and other unsavoury agents in shaping the text’s reception.

Immediately, we can see case studies of when these would be applicable to Nabokov Studies:

(1) The prestige of Lolita in allowing Nabokov’s older texts to become republished and translated with the addition of textual apparatus, leading to sustained fame that lasted throughout his career; the fight for rights to Nabokov’s publications; Strong Opinions originating in order to fulfill a contract with McGraw-Hill; and the drawn-out public debate surrounding the publication of TOoL;

(2) Nabokov depositing selected manuscripts at the Library of Congress for tax break reasons and holding back the manuscript of Ada due to perceived worth; the eventual publication of TOoL;the initial censorship of Lolita; the scant appearances of Nabokov’s literary works in anthologies; and Nabokov’s careful preservation of a persona in all public appearances; and

(3) The smuggling of Lolita into America and other texts into the USSR; Girodais’s impact on the manuscript of Lolita when removing many unnecessary French phrases; the widespread circulation of pirate editions of Nabokov’s works in the former-USSR and on the web; and Nabokov’s general opinion of editors and publishers despite the evidence that they often helped improve the text.

This list is potentially endless and offers a plethora of new avenues for exploration in Nabokov studies. My contribution to the growing body of book historical research is a refined model of the book trade reflecting the importance of hypertext in the processes of composition and reception. The model  is the shape of an hourglass to show the importance of a physical manifestation of a text in the process, as opposed to its disappearance in Darnton’s circuit. The two axes represent the most fundamental concepts of the hourglass: on the vertical axis, time, and the horizontal axis, meaning. The practical implication of this is the model displays the flow of meaning from author to reader via the text. This can never be reversed as compositional meaning is completely different to receptional meaning, even when the author makes a comment post-publication, such as Nabokov’s repeated assertions about the authorship debate in Pale Fire that are completely contradictory. Moreover, the hourglass is not cyclical as a new version of the text derives from the original but does not recreate it. The model’s also develops a framework for critiquing the reception of text more effectively than the other models of the book trade that conflate this multifaceted aspect to an after-thought in book history. This offers a robust mechanism to look at the development of a text such as Pale Fire, which has a substantial composition and reception history, although I want to focus on one particular aspect: reprints and appropriations.

When Pale Fire was published in 1962, it had undergone a long gestation period dating back not only to the first index cards dated 1957, but also to the 1930s with “Ultima Thule” and “Solus Rex.” The composition process is relatively invisible as we only have archival evidence for the manuscript, so work-in-progress and galley proofs, all of which show Nabokov’s development of the central themes of the novel, but not to a degree that can satisfactorily account for the changes between manuscript and published novel. This can be supplemented by Nabokov’s correspondence discussing the novel and two pre-publication extracts: “King’s Gambit,” a revised version of the note to line 130 that was due for publication in Harper’s Bazaar, but was pulled because of creative differences; and “The Late Mr. Shade,” an early version of the Foreword published in Harper’s magazine. From this, we can reconstruct some of the early development of the novel including, most enticingly, three major changes:

(1) “your favorite” appears in the manuscript as “my favorite;”

(2) Goldsworth is a professor rather than a judge at an early point in the manuscript; and

(3) “See my notes to line 949-999” warps into “see my note to line 999” to “note to line 991.”

While these offer intriguing alternate versions of Pale Fire, my interest lies instead in the changes that have occurred in the development of the novel through its complex lifespan. The traces of the reception process are some of the most interesting parts of this model to emerge, which can only be seen through close comparison of states of the text and reader’s reactions to the text. Some of these completely change the reader’s understanding of the text, such as Penguin’s decision to remove the Kindle version’s index as Amazon provide ‘superior’ forms of automated indexing through their software packages. Audiobook and radio-play editions of the text also offer interesting variations on a novel that relies on its bookishness to generate meanings. Through tracing the digitization process of certain texts we can also begin to deduce which versions copy each other. Most egregiously, Shannon Chamberlain’s version has been copied by GS Lipon, which can be seen through the scanning mistakes unique to both editions, most explicitly characterized in the transformation of “the turf” to “the turd” to create the ludicrous “with incredulous fingers he picks up from the turd that compact ovoid body.” This brief sketch demonstrates the importance of remembering the text is only a version rather than the definitive edition.

A further significant factor when considering the transmission history of Pale Fire is the rhetorical significance of the novel’s hypertext structure. There have been at least six unauthorized editions of Pale Fire on the Web, and many more that were never shared. Recent eBook editions have also included basic hypertext mechanisms. The reception of the novel has been intertwined with the hypertext network Nabokov constructed within the novel and readers have tried to appropriate this with their web-based editions. The hypertext poetics of Nabokov’s novel are complex and not easily represented in the mechanisms of the Web, so many of these versions alter the structure of the novel. The novel requires a delicate balance between the poem and commentary, since Kinbote creates explicit links from the commentary to the poem, but never the other way round. The technology of hypertext could also be better exploited, as a digital edition could track the reception of the novel through the reader’s pathways. This empirical data could test the claims of critics who suggest there are standard ways of traversing the novel.

While this may be exciting new areas for exploration, there are several caveats at adopting such an approach. Most readily, such research needs the availability of archival research, and this presents several problems. The material is scattered over the US, mainly in the Library of Congress and New York Public Library, but also spread in various locations and in publisher’s archives to document his complex history with various publishers. This is then ignoring the problem that much of this material either has not been uncovered or simply does not exist. The value of the Lolita manuscript will forever be unknown, to name the most obvious example. The third problem is the effort required in order to undertake serious book historical work, which may require tracking down multiple pressings and searching in the archive for countless hours to find little fruitful evidence, given the patchiness of Nabokov’s archives. Despite these potential problems, book history promises to be a fruitful approach to Nabokov studies.

Abstract: When Dmitri Nabokov finally decided to publish his father’s famous unfinished last novel, The Original of Laura (TOoL), he took the unusual decision of presenting it as a facsimile of Nabokov’s index cards along with a transcription. In the aftermath of TOoL’s publication, the reception of Nabokov’s artistry has not shifted, and many critics have shunned the publication. Although the fragments reveal Nabokov’s declining power, they offer a powerful entry point to Nabokov’s mode of composition to the popular imagination. The original edition of the fragments encourages this behaviour as the cards are perforated, so the reader can remove the cards from their binding and shuffle them into any order they wish. The materiality of the text confronts the reader with ontological questions about Nabokov’s processes of composition.

The current paper argues that the value of TOoL lies in reading it as material evidence marketed to the mass public rather than remaining available only to those who can access the original. While the materials in the Library of Congress are now available for any interested party, unless they have access to the Library or funds to receive microfilm copies, the manuscripts are inaccessible. TOoL is an entry point into understanding Nabokov’s mode of composition. For an author with such an aura around his genius and his reluctance to conform to the norms of the book trade, such a document unravels the compositional artifices.

The facsimile of TOoL bear material witness to Nabokov’s hypertextual composition method, as the cards are ordered in a multi-linear fashion rather than conforming to an ascending number system. Several of the index cards feature rough drafts or material that has been worked in elsewhere, offering further insights into Nabokov’s material reliance on index cards to compose his complexly structured novels. Thus, Dmitri’s Nabokov’s choice of presentation for his father’s unfinished novel reveal new perceptions of Nabokov’s computational method of composition to the wider public, uncovering another way in which Nabokov can be connected to the history of hypertext.

’Efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate’: Nabokov’s composition TOoL. Vladimir Nabokov & Composition Panel. NeMLA. April 2014. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Abstract: 

The rise of the Kindle has marked the appearance of the first authorized e-books of many post-World War Two authors. As e-reading continues to grow in popularity, this allows a new audience to discover older works due to the affordances and availability of these e-books. Many of these novels, however, have not previously been digitized and are wrought by the negative traces of digitisation well known to academic and professional digitization projects although these are often not discussed within the context of traditionally published e-books.

This project assesses the vulnerable textuality of a single author on a single platform: Vladimir Nabokov’s Kindle e-books. Apart from posthumously published works, including 2008’s controversial The Original of Laura, most of Nabokov’s works were originally authored, edited and published at least 40 years ago, with some now approaching their centenary anniversary. The remediation of these texts is problematic and error-strewn, not only because the source versions, the Penguin mass market paperbacks have varied in quality, lacking at time forewords and indexes central to the fiction, but also because of the discrepancies with their corresponding print versions. The paper will read these errors and markers of print culture within the digital edition to demonstrate the complex forms of material textuality present in the Kindle.

“Vulnerable Textuality in the E-Book Marketplace.” Society for Textual Scholarship. March 2014. University of Washington, Seattle.

Next year’s SHARP conference in Antwerp (17-21 September 2014) has the central theme of ‘Religions of the Book’. I would be interested in submitting a proposal for a session on ‘New Sites of Worship’ and invite anyone interested in this theme to join this session.

The rise of new social networks and websites both general (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr) and those geared towards reading (e.g. Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing) have led to ‘new sites of worship’ for fandom of literary authors. Users have populated these sites to discuss their favourite authors and books. Occasionally this discourse has become out-of-control and fandom has become fanatical and discussion of the literary turns into worship.

The proposed session will explore the traces of rabid fandom online including but limited to role-play, interaction with authors, obsession and misuses of social media. Please send a short abstract (400 words) to Simon Rowberry (s.rowberry.13@unimail.winchester.ac.uk) by Thursday 28 November if you want to participate in this session.

It is well known that Nabokov projected a persona in his rare public statements and interviews. He used such occasions to stamp his authority on his texts and to preserve the myth of a solitary genius who was not fond of many other authors. It is unsurprising that his correspondence reveals a different, more personable character. Make no mistake, Nabokov-as-public-figure appears in some letters to publishers and authors as he denounces second-rate authors and those who introduce errors into his works!

One of the many examples of this discrepancy can be seen in Nabokov’s mentions of the typewriter in his correspondence and published interviews. Nabokov’s composition method after 1941 relied on index cards and pencils, a method he had transferred from his research into butterflies. When the time came to type up these index cards, he left the typing to his wife, Véra. Although this offers no direct evidence that Vladimir himself could not type, in personal correspondence to James Laughlin, an early American publisher of Nabokov’s novels, in November 1942, Nabokov admitted parenthetically that “I cannot type.” (Selected Letters, 43)

Three years later, however, he included a holograph to a typed letter to Katharine White: “This is the first letter I have typed out myself in my life. Took me 28 minutes but came out beautifully.” (SL, 54) Here we can see an apprentice’s pride and an appreciation of the aesthetic value of typing, especially through the struggle. This moment of glory is in stark contrast to Nabokov’s public pronouncement years later (1963) in a Playboy  interview to Alvin Toffler: “Yes I never learned to type.” (Strong Opinions, 29). Undoubtedly after his initial struggle, he did not take over all his typing duties, but under such a public statement lies a much more complex private engagement with the technology he dismisses.

I’ve spent the day successfully viewing the copy of William Gibson, Dennis Ashbaugh and Kevin Begos Jr.’s Agrippa: book of the dead at the National Art Library (once I’ve gathered my thoughts and reorganized my notes – I’ll write up my findings regarding the differences between this and other editions of the text) and being unsuccessful in an attempt to see Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post currently installed next door at the Science Museum. These are two works of hybrid physical-digital literature that can’t easily be replicated and distributed widely among the community, but equally are incredible works that require physical interaction in order to fully appreciate them. Certainly, Agrippa was a completely different physical experience than I had imagined from any description I had read.

Along with other important works of digital literature, there are very few, if more than one, functional copies of these two artefacts. Preservation has been a pressing need within the community as the wealth of recent literature would suggest. In recent years there have been a promising number of acquisitions of important digital literature author’s papers in libraries and a number of laboratories doing important work such as the Media Archaeology Lab, UCSC’s large collection of Japanese videogames, MIT’s Trope Tank, etc (As an aside, I don’t know if there is any such lab in the UK yet?). The currently on-going NEH Office of Digital Humanities project, “Pathfinders” has been instrumental in the promoting preservation through documentary and “Let’s Play” practice. This is useful work for the institutionalization of digital literature but access remains an issue.

If some of these works are still executable in their original form, or preserved in some other form if they take are very physical (e.g. Where can I access works built to run with CAVE?), how do we find out where these places are? Catalogues of digital works are being built: ELMCIP, Electronic Literature Directory, I ♥ E-Poetry, and so forth, but a common finding aid for where to travel to when you actually want to interact with these works is still missing.

A useful analogy for what might solve this problem can be found in one of the great undertakings of bibliographers in the last 150 years: the Short Title Catalogue (STC). The STC was a monumental undertaking to document the existing copies of books printed between 1475 and 1640 in the British Isles and notes the libraries that held the titles. Rather than noting all books that could have existed, it focused instead on those that survived. This allowed researchers to find copies of these rare materials. Surely many of digital incunabula deserve similar treatment?

Now, the short title aspect of the work is no longer important as digital bibliographies allow for longer records, and the STC itself is now online with much more metadata than the crammed references of the printed original. Equally, the records of locations has changed since the revised edition, and with issues such as the Senate House Library’s proposed sales of their Shakespeare Folios, the catalogue remains in flux and libraries may no longer have the same holdings. The STC instead offers a starting point.

The finding aid aspect of the STC would be of great use for scholars interested in the material aspects of digital literature. If we had a centralized database offering the locations and any system requirements based upon the limitations, this could aid access to the original artefacts and enrich our understanding of early digital literature. Setting up such a database would be another step towards legitimizing the form as it would once more demonstrate the importance of the material form as something worth traveling for, rather than relying on the description of those earlier scholars lucky enough to interact with some of the more elusive and ephemeral works.

I’ve recently created my first Twitterbot, Vladimir Nabotov, by appropriating the code from Zach Whalen’s brilliant Pelafina Lièvre. The bot itself is fairly derivative and works on the principle of Markov chains, but the source material is esoteric enough to deserve further comment.

The bot draws its source material from bootleg versions of Nabokov’s works available online with all the errors, typographical quirks and other peculiarities. Using Nabokov as source material is also problematized by Nabokov’s frequent code-switching between English, Russian and French.

Automatically generating tweets can often lead to failure, as the source might not be an interesting section of the text or the bot might post something offensive. Nabotov embraces this failure with the “dirty” source material. This can lead to some familiar motifs being recast in new forms:

Lo-less when I strolled back.

— Vladimir Nabotov (@VVNabokov) August 26, 2013

Equally, there can be some interesting results with non-English languages, such as this snippet of Zembla:

Ufgut, ufgut, velkam ut Semblerland! — Vladimir Nabotov (@VVNabokov) August 24, 2013

These results would be desirable in a usual twitterbot, but the missteps reveal problems with the texts readers are most likely to encounter if they are unwilling to purchase a copy of a carefully produced book. This can take the form of weird glyphs, errant punctuation (Nabokov loves his parentheses!) and conjoined words:

Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Grishkin, an overtly subtle yam extolling the Roman faith. — Vladimir Nabotov (@VVNabokov) August 24, 2013

CreamThis is not quite exact. Serious?… No, I hope not.

— Vladimir Nabotov (@VVNabokov) August 24, 2013

Failure is often banded around as an important aspect of the digital humanities, and twitterbots certainly allow us to understand the potential failure (and harm) of generative writing, but equally, this failure can be channeled to examine other types of failure too.

Inspired by Juan Martinez’s excellent visualization comparing mentions of Lolita to Nabokov in the Google Books corpus (and the 55th anniversairy of Lolita‘s publication in America today!), I thought I would delve a little deeper into the Google Books n-gram data available and test the claims using the raw data (which admittedly is very rough and contains a lot of duplicates, but others a rough estimate of volumes current digitized by Google).

Looking at raw 2-grams (that is, all instances of “Lolita” and “Nabokov” with one word after it referenced in the most up to date data sets available from Google), there are two figures available for analysis: the number of times a word is mentioned in the complete corpus, and the volume of texts that reference the word at least once.

The online viewer does not distinguish between the two categories and is case-sensitive, so the raw data gives us more data to play with.
There is a clear difference between the total references and the numbers of books using the words, as one book may repeatedly mention Nabokov but never Lolita, popularity should be mapped by the number of texts using the word, rather than the total references. Such a graph still shows that Nabokov is more popular for most years other than the publication of Lolita, as Juan noted, and the period from 1966-1969 for some reason.

Click for large
The average number of references per book further asserts Nabokov’s enduring popularity. Since Nabokov is mentioned on average more times than Lolita, not only is he discussed by a broader range of texts, but they are engaging with him as a subject in a deeper manner than Lolita.

Click for large

There were also some interesting phrases that came out of the data, with their first data of use next to them:

• Lolita sunglasses (1976)
• Lolita complex (1959)
• Lolita Delores (1962)
• Nabokov Festival (1985)
• Nabokov studies (1967)
• Nabokov archive (1989)

N.B. This is a revised version of my presentation at Digital humanities 2013. http://dh2013.unl.edu/abstracts/ab-163.html

Mark Sample’s “Unseen and Unremarked Upon” laments the lost years of digital humanities research from texts that exist on the wrong side of the copyright divide. Sample constructs a satirical counterfactual history of digital humanities studies of Don DeLellio, an author who he posits is central to the digital humanities canon. (Sample) This concern is serious, since there is much to be gained from critical projects examining the mirroring of computer culture’s rise in twentieth century fiction.

The B© distinction (Kirschenbaum) has recently been supplanted by the dawn of ADMCA (Anno Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Conceptualized in 1995, around the time of mainstream adoption of the Web, and passed as legislation in 1998, the peak of the Dot.Com boom (Hilderbrand 103), ADMCA awkwardly heralded the age of digital copyright in an antiquated and hybrid manner. Although the DMCA has proved controversial, it has also allowed for guerrilla activity online. Since the owners of servers are not directly responsible for the material uploaded to them under the safe-harbour provisions, risks can be taken with the distribution of content before take-down, exemplified by user-generated content on YouTube. (Hilderbrand 242) This has led to a detection arms race where users flip remix videos and pitch-shift vocals in order to avoid algorithmic detection.

The countercultural space the DMCA safe-harbour provisions afford YouTube reflects the older phenomenon of Napster, another platform that permanently altered modes of transmission. Napster demonstrates the tensions between two histories of the success of a format (in this case, the MP3): the corporate history that celebrates the coming of the Device, often coupled with a “Killer App,” and the guerrilla history that celebrates the counterculture that developed around a more democratic form of sharing media. Lucas Hilderbrand suggests often the countercultural history predates the commercial one and is a vital part of a medium’s success (Hilderbrand 78). Jonathan Sterne has framed this as the Napster versus iPod moments (Sterne).

Within the same debate, Kenneth Goldsmith has argued that we have not yet had a Napster moment for literature, as texts are not bootlegged to the same degree as music and video (Goldsmith 82). Goldsmith, such a pivotal player in pushing the boundaries of copyright through his conceptual poetry – particularly in its latest manifestation in the Printing the Internet project – highlights a useful distinction in understanding how online media sharing differs from the dreaded term, piracy. If Adrian Johns introduction to Piracy reaches its apex with the revelation of a pirate corporation mirroring the entire structure of NEC, producing counterfeit goods purely for profit (Johns 1), bootlegging is the best way of describing online sharing activity other than a few outliers. This may appear to be an ideological choice, akin to the terrorist-freedom fighter binary, but as Hilderbrand suggests, “bootlegging functions to fill in the gaps of market failure… archival omissions… and personal collections.” (Hilderbrand 22–23)

The bootlegging of literature is starting to take place with literature in recent years. William Gibson’s aphorism “the streets finds its own uses for things” rings true. Both amateurs and digital humanists have in recent years been undertaking guerrilla digital humanities, a phenomenon made possible in ADMCA. Guerrilla digital humanities can be broadly defined as the application of methods associated with digital humanities to texts still protected by copyright laws. As these projects must be covert and rarely are affiliated with institutions or grant funding, this underground activity can be equated to the Napster moment of contemporary literature.

There is an important caveat to this activity. Aaron Swartz’s mass download of public domain journal articles from JSTOR through MIT’s network and subsequent arrest ended tragically. Swartz’s operation fit well within the bounds of bootlegging given the articles were in the public domain and the method was an exemplar of guerrilla activity. The case demonstrates a divide that still exists and must be carefully toed by guerrilla digital humanists. Although it is unclear what Swartz intended to do with the articles, it is clear that a facsimile or representation of the original work is out-of-bounds in most cases.

Deformance (Samuels & McGann) such as visualization, mapping and other creative endeavours moves away from this. We are unlikely to be able to explore free scholarly critical editions of Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre in the near future, but deformative interpretations built on digital tools as guerrilla movements are likely to flourish. This is because “copyright actually insists on aesthetics and recognizes the importance of tangibility or interfaces: the law does not protect ideas, only expressions in fixed forms.” (Hilderbrand 82) New expressions in new forms at least one deformance removed from the original have the best chance of surviving.

Swartz’s case serves as a warning though, that guerrilla activity may come at the risk of the openness of the community. Digital humanities thrives on sharing, resharing and forking, but to undertake such work, guerrilla digital humanists must conduct their methods under a sleight of hand to avoid detection. The final result must be published in a samizdat culture, as official channels will be too public.

The blueprint for this form of activity is in uncreative or conceptual writing, an activity most frequently undertaken in print. In this framework, two of the most likely candidates for the Napster moment of text are creative adaptations of literature online. Fan fiction demonstrates the manipulability of thematic devices, while literary Twitterbots explore literature as potential language in oulipian ecstacy. Horse_ebooks provides the template for potential literature on Twitter and many anonymous literary adaptations have appeared of varying quality. The pattern, however, is obvious: Twitter is to text as YouTube is to video. Twitter provides a space for relatively low-risk experimentation in guerrilla activity.

In more recent years, Twitterbot auteurs have emerged, with Darius Kazemi and Mark Sample probably being the two most prolific. Generative versions of pithy William Carlos Williams’s poems, Bruno Latour meets swag culture, and My Favourite Things now explore the potential of Twitter literature. The constraint of 140 characters is oulipian on its own, but when connected with selective use of remixed source material, these bots produce mixed results but with some glorious moments of serendipity closing in on what appears to be self-consciousness. Equally, as Ian Bogost states in Alien Phenomenology, carpentry of this unfiltered sort can often lead to offensive moments unless strict filters regulate the underlying code. (Bogost 97–100) Post-publication filtering through retweets enables the cream of the crop to be shared with a wider audience.

Sample has also engaged in more extensive guerrilla activity online. House of Leaves Of Grass (HoLoG) works through several layers of ADMCA deformations. HoLoG builds on Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between, a textual mash-up of Emily Dickinson’s poetry with Moby Dick, instantly recognisable due to the clash in typographic and lexical content, further remediated through a schizophrenic interface that disrupts the reading experience. Sample’s guerrilla operation is to transpose the subject of remix to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – yes, freely available in the public domain – with Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a text published in 2000 and still subject to copyright law. This remix survives ADMCA as long as it remains a guerrilla publication.

Guerrilla digital humanities is not limited to remediation and editions, Joyce scholarship is fraught with examples of those who have attempted unsuccessfully to explore digital applications of Joyce. FWEET approaches the problem differently by re-appropriating Finnegans Wake as a database, turning every line into a series of possibilities and connections other parts of the text in various different forms.

Playing on Lev Manovich’s Narrative-Database dichotomy (Manovich), FWEET disrupts the text on a narrative level and requires the reader to engage with the database connections that emerge within the text. Although this makes it difficult to read the text in its original form, it is possible to extract the text. FWEET works as a guerrilla publication on two levels. Firstly, it remediates a text whose copyright situation is still providing to be problematic, but more interestingly, most of the annotations are sourced from scholarly texts still protected by copyright.

A further interesting example can be found in the work of Vladimir Nabokov. The digital humanities link to Nabokov runs back to Ted Nelson’s apocryphal demonstration of Pale Fire for the Hypertext Editing System back in the late 1960s, for which Nelson received permission from G. P. Putnan & Sons, Nabokov’s US publisher at the time. In more recent years, Brian Boyd’s Ada Online has offered an annotated version of Nabokov’s later work, Ada, or Ardor, for free online with permission of Dmitri Nabokov. Dmitri appeared to be open to digital editions, suggesting that his father’s last unfinished novel would work well as a digital edition.

 It is hard to tell how far this could go, but if we don’t ask, how do we know what the answer is? If we don’t work within the permitted boundaries of the DMCA, how can we know what is possible? As Bielstein states, “permissions are hard to avoid, but in principle you don’t want to ask permission” – asking permissions sets a precedent (Bielstein 10). Working towards integrating contemporary texts into the digital humanities can continue in the covert way as guerrilla digital humanities or it could equally push for permissions and set a precedent for what creative interpretations of literary texts are possible under fair-use. The only way forward is to test the waters.

Works Cited

Bielstein, Susan M. Permissions: A Survival Guide, Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print.

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Print.

Hilderbrand, Lucas. Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Print.

Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1 (2013) : n. pag. . <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000151/000151.html>.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001. Print.

Sample, Mark. “Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 187–201. Print.

Samuels, Lisa, and Jerome J. McGann. “Deformance and Interpretation.” New Literary History 30.1 (1999) : 25–56. Print.

Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Print.

In a conversation with René Alladaye about his brilliant new book (The Darker Side of Pale Fire – the best introduction to Pale Fire currently available, although it’s only available through Amazon.fr currently) at the recent Nabokov & France conference, the question of translating the Index came up. In most languages, this is not a problem, because the final entry, “Zembla, a distant northern land.” (PF, 315), which works as a fitting conclusion to the narrative, will naturally come last as “Z” is the last letter of the alphabet.

In non-Latin scripts, this is more problematic, most prominently in Nabokov’s native tongue, Russian, where “З” or “Z” is ninth of 33 characters. Véra Nabokov’s translation of Pale Fire for Ardis Press works round this by rephrasing the entry:
ЯЧЕЙКА яшмы, Зембля, далекая северная страна.
[Orbicle of jasp, Zembla, a far northern country]
Я [ya] is the last letter of the Russian alphabet. This raises a further question of what “orbicle of jasp” – a quotation from line 558, “Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp” (PF, 54) – is doing in front of Zembla to retain its position? I don’t have any immediate answers, but a deeper analysis of the differences between the English and Russian index will surely help. Ultimately, the flow of the narrative is more important than the index’s order, indicating the importance in the Nabokovs’s collective mind of having the Zembla entry of the index close the text.

Thanks to Marina Savina for helping translating the Russian and finding the reference to “orbicle of jasp” in the poem.

V. Nabokov. 1962. Pale Fire. New York: GP Putnam’s & Son.
V. Nabokov. 1983. Бледныĭ огонь [Pale Fire]. trans. by Véra Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis Press.